Who Really Took the Famous Carmen Taylor Photo of the Second Plane?

(Modified and updated 10/21/07; 7/1/09; 12/8/09; 12/29/09)

This one, which was distributed by AP:



Here's Carmen Taylor:

and here is her story:

Amateur Photographer Captures Attacks

By CAROLINE BYRNE, Associated Press Writer

Amateur photographer captures NYC attack. (AP Photo/Robert Bukaty) NEW YORK (AP) - Carmen Taylor had boarded the ferry to Ellis Island and was snapping photos of the Manhattan skyline Tuesday when the sky exploded.

"We thought it was fireworks," said Taylor, who had borrowed a Sony digital camera from her son for her five-day visit to New York from Ft. Smith, Ark.

Taylor, who works as an auditor in a nursing home, captured United Airlines Flight 175 as it shattered the south tower of the World Trade Center complex, just 18 minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 smashed into the north tower.

"I looked up again and this plane went by so I just put my camera back up. That's when the second explosion took place," she said.

"We were terrified. We were wondering if the Statue of Liberty was the next target and that's when people started streaming out of their buildings," Taylor said.

Taylor got off the ferry and showed her digital photos to the swarms of dazed office tower workers. One man suggested Taylor use his office nearby to e-mail her pictures to her local television station KHBS.

Two of her photos, one showing the scene just before the plane hit and the other immediately after, were distributed worldwide by The Associated Press.

Got that? She had just "boarded the ferry to Ellis Island and was snapping photos of the Manhattan skyline Tuesday when the sky exploded."

Recently, Ms. Taylor was interviewed and she said she took the picture from the ferry boat before it left.

Perhaps.

Michael Hezerkhani, who supposedly took the famous CNN "Ghostplane" footage, must have been on the same boat. Did anyone else on this tour boat get videos or photos of the second hit?

However, Ms. Taylor is lying about at least one thing. In the interview, she says the boat never left the dock after the second hit.

But look at the picture in the camera she is holding above. The picture in her camera shows a much more distant perspective of the towers than the famous AP photo above-- notice how the WTC towers stand out more from the surrounding buildings. This shot could only have been taken from further out than the dock-- from away out on the water.

So what else is she lying about?

There are other problems with Taylor's story--
1) the plane photo is a very professional-looking shot to be taken by an amateur with a old fashioned and relatively low quality digital camera.
2) there is the famous "pod-like" bulge under the starboard wing, which casts doubt upon the authenticity of this plane
3) the coloring on the plane is completely wrong for a United Airlines Boeing 767-- while there is a gray stripe down the bottom, the lower sides are dark BLUE, not light gray/light blue.

So the question is, WHO did take these pictures?

Carmen Taylor, or some professional photographer operative who inserted a digital plane into the shot?

Or is Taylor the operative? Or is she just a good "witness from middle America" to the second hit who is being used by the perps?

Either way, there is little doubt that there is something very wrong with her story.

Here is the series she supposedly took:


Ms. Taylor says she was at the end of the boat, sitting on a container. How did that gray-haired person get in front of her in the last shot?

Considering that the old digital camera she says she used had a very long lag time (up to 10 seconds) between shots, there is some doubt that she was able to take this series.

Here are some other things about Carmen Taylor:
1) this article says she is from Lavaca, Arkansas, and gives another version of her story.

2) this article lists Carmen Taylor for an AP photo on a Post Office ceremony in 2001. Did she get a job with AP after 9/11? Or is it a different Carmen Taylor?

3) this article shows the plane photo and then very oddly credits both "Taylor, Carmen & Torrens, Jerry". Jerry Torrens is associated with a picture of WTC2 collapsing, seen in other articles but not here, why is he listed here? Did he help Taylor somehow? This is odd.

4) some further discussion about her here.

UPDATE 7/1/09: Sources are now saying the photo of Taylor above with the camera and the wrong shot in her camera has been altered. Here is a photo of Taylor with what appears to be the famous plane photo in her camera (from here):

Conceivably because the plane shot was copyrighted, people who used this shot altered the photo in her camera so as to avoid copyright issue if they showed this picture. But... that is still weird. Why use the picture with the wrong photo in the camera? Why use the picture at all? Why go through so much trouble to photoshop a new picture in her camera? Why not black out the camera viewfinder? And how did people who alter this picture take out the large AP watermark? I still think this story stinks.

Also, as described here, Taylor took yet one more picture of the South tower-- of the smoking hole.

Note the 33.

Extensive discussion on Taylor here at Pumpitout, with Taylor apparently asnswering questions. She seems amazingly honest and forthright with lots of details given. There seem to be some conflicts of her recollection with the official path of UA175. Some interesting discussion of the fly-by plane too. Lastly, she says other people on the ferry have very different recollections of the plane-- odd. Overall I hate to call her a liar-- but either she is telling the truth about her picture... or she isn't.

UPDATE 12/8/09:
Nice overview of the story here, with all her pictures from that day. Interesting that the shot with the plane has almost half the pixels as the other shots. Also note how that in the plane shot, the building in the foreground is darker than in the next shot with the fireball. Is this evidence of tampering?

UPDATE 12/29/09:
from Thomas Potter--

THE most propagandized image of 9/11 was a photograph purported to have been taken by Carmen Taylor of Lavaca, AR. (She recently sold her home on 12/3/2009 Parcel# 60100-0014-00000-00) The fabricated plot-line is that SHE took the photograph of United flight 175 frozen in time as it approached World Trade Center Two and met a kindly businessman in Battery Park by the name of Doug Haluza who offered to take her to his office so that she could transmit the photos to her home town television station.

As the fabricated plot-line continues, Carmen Taylor was flooded with offers for the rights to release her one-chance-in-a-million photo and she chose Associated Press who dispatched their photographer, Robert Bukaty, to her hotel room and he took a photograph of her holding her "borrowed" camera with the digital display turned on and facing the camera.

While searching the Internet Archive in late October of 2007, I located an Associated Press news item by Caroline Byrne entitled "Amateur Photographer Captures Attack" that was posted on 9/13/01 to the news section of a web site devoted to digital cameras. Robert Bukaty's photo of Carmen Taylor accompanied that article. Immediately my keen eye noticed that the image in the digital display of the "borrowed" camera that Carmen Taylor was holding was not United flight 175 frozen in time as it approached World Trade Center Two. The image was the smoking towers STILL STANDING from a HOBOKEN perspective. How could this be? The image found in the Internet Archive violated all official accounts. It would be IMPOSSIBLE for Carmen Taylor to have an image of the smoking towers still standing in the digital display of the "borrowed" camera she was holding when AP photographer Robert Bukaty took her photograph.

To resolve the conflict of the image in her "borrowed" camera's digital display I contacted a Canadian by the name of Jeff Hill who could legally record Carmen Taylor, Doug Haluza, and Robert Bukaty without their knowledge. As you can tell from listening to Jeff Hill's 11/01/07 interview of Doug Haluza, he CLEARLY STATES that Carmen Taylor was IN his office building when the towers collapsed so it would be IMPOSSIBLE for Carmen Taylor to have an image of the smoking towers still standing in the digital display of the camera she was holding when AP photographer Robert Bukaty took her photograph. In the Robert Bukaty interview, which was performed on the same day, Robert Bukaty CLEARLY STATES that the image in Carmen Taylor's camera was NOT United flight 175 frozen in time. It was an image of the SMOKING TOWERS STILL STANDING from a HOBOKEN perspective.

When Doug Haluza and Robert Bukaty were interviewed by Jeff Hill on November 1, 2007, ONLY Mr. Hill and myself knew of the original Carmen Taylor photo that was published in ERROR with the towers STILL STANDING in the display screen of her "borrowed" camera and not the AP edited image with United flight 175 frozen in time. This was WHY Mr. Hill called them. We had inside information that we wanted to verify. Doug Haluza and Robert Bukaty not only hung themselves with their own words but Carmen Taylor as well.

Doug Haluza/Jeff Hill November 1, 2007
http://www.filefreak.com/files/90235_1xuhy/dh_110107.mp3

Robert Bukaty/Jeff Hill November 1, 2007
http://www.filefreak.com/files/85088_9jd9h/rb_ap_110107.mp3

If John Demjanjuk can be charged with accessory to murder for the death of 27,900 Jews as a guard at the Sobibor death camp, then Carmen Taylor, Doug Haluza, and Robert Bukaty can be charged with accessory to murder for the death of 2,605 innocent World Trade Center victims. There is no statute of limitation for accessory to murder and I have another 30 years to hunt down the fascists and their minions who created the 9/11 Holocaust with or without anyone's assistance.

The ball is now in your court. You can react to this information two ways. You can marginalize me, write me off as a kook, and ignore this letter or you can act on the information supplied. Unless you can predict future events, keep in mind that you will never know what administration will hold future power and what they will do with this information, whom it was supplied to, and when it was supplied. Would you want to risk being charged as an accessory to mass murder?